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Reading Books and Playing Games All Day

Fantasy AdventureAThon Day 5 Progress

6:00 AM: I didn’t get a ton of reading done last night because I was honestly exhausted. Still, I got a little further into Throne of Glass and have some mixed opinions so far. The world and plot are both interesting enough, but there are two aspects of the book that aren’t sitting quite right with me. First of all, Celaena is kind of an annoying protagonist. She’s very arrogant and seems to believe the world revolves around her. Everyone also keeps explaining that she is this accomplished assassin, but I have yet to see any actual proof that she’s done anything. Character development is always one of my favorite parts of series, however, so just because I dislike her at the moment doesn’t mean I will always hate her.

The larger problem is that nothing about Throne of Glass feels unique yet. Every aspect of this book feels like a rehashed version of a dozen other fantasy series. Obviously, I don’t expect any book I read these days to be completely groundbreaking or anything, but if I can’t name a single aspect of the title that feels new and refreshing, there’s this overwhelming feeling that I’ve read this story before. I’m going to put this aside for the first part of the day and work on finishing up Give Me Your Hand.

10:00 AM: I finished Give Me Your Hand and it wasn’t great, but at least it’s book five of the readathon down. Megan Abbott’s books to have a divisive quality that usually causes her average review score to be pretty low, so I did go into this knowing I may not enjoy it much. There are a number of reasons I didn’t care for this book, but the main issue I had is that I felt like far too much of the plot relied on the characters being extraordinarily dumb, to the point where the plot was only being advanced because the protagonist refused to take certain common sense actions.

In thrillers, there is a sweet spot that needs to be hit with the amount of intelligence that the protagonists need to have. If they are too smart, they figure the mystery out too quickly and the suspense is lost, but if they are too dumb, they won’t figure out anything independently and even sabotage their own progress solving the mystery, leaving readers to get frustrated that no one in the book seems to understand who the killer is and why. Nothing is more annoying than the book’s length getting padded because the main character is dumb.

This is my third Megan Abbott title, and only the first I have disliked, so I’m not put off of her as an author. While I’ll wait for a while until I’ve recovered from this one, I will definitely be picking up some of her other works in the future. Still, since this wasn’t the most inspiring read, I’m going to take a lengthy Borderlands break today and try and make some good progress in Throne of Glass tonight. I need a break so my negative feelings about Give Me Your Hand don’t bleed over into my other reads.

5:00 PM: I took a nice, long break and played a lot of Borderlands. My soldier class playthrough is coming together well, with my character currently at level 23. While I still prefer to play as the siren, I am enjoying learning the nuances of another class. There’s definitely a learning curve to understanding the right skill tree to go down and how best to use my special ability, but figuring those things out is part of the fun. The goal is that I’d like to actually do at least one run-through with each of the four classes, and so far, I’m not regretting my choice!

Now that I’ve taken a lengthy break, I’ll be spending my evening starting The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris, as well as just hanging out with my family. I’m not sure what to expect from this book because I don’t know a lot about it, but my dad read it earlier this year and liked it, so I trust that I probably will, too. I’m hoping to finish both this and Throne of Glass this weekend, but if I am unable to, then I will be prioritizing The Tattooist of Auschwitz because I don’t have any book that I can use as a substitute for “a book set in the past”, whereas I can use A Darker Shade of Magic to also be my first book in the series.

9:30 PM: I haven’t gotten much progress done with The Tattooist of Auschwitz because I was with my family, but what I have read so far is wonderful. It’s quite an emotional read, given the Holocaust setting, but it’s always important to read books like this to remember the darker periods of history so we don’t repeat our own mistakes. I’ll be reading more of this in bed tonight and, as always, I will report back with what I read tomorrow!

Not a ton of reading occurred today, but even if I didn’t finish another book this week, I’d be content with what I managed to get done. Five books in five days is a lot of reading, and I even liked four out of five of them! Hopefully, I can finish strong, though! Let me know in the comments if you’ve read any of these books!

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I’ve seen quite a few ‘assassin’ books since I read Throne of Glass, but without checking publication dates I can’t be sure which came first. However, there were a few echoes of the Robin Hobbe books that I read at least a decade ago.

My overall thoughts on Throne of Glass is that I’m not sure there’s anything overly unique here, but sometimes I really just want to read to have fun and not think too much, and this series is probably going to scratch that itch for me.